About Us

Our Vision

Although global media organizations abound, none of them work to consistently improve news coverage of the highest stake, taboo topics that often fuel violence, bigotry and human rights violations. News coverage of LGBTQI, women’s, and religious rights are highly inflamed.

To address this crisis, the top flight Missouri School of Journalism’s Center on Religion & the Professions — a Pew Center of Excellence — will launch a new initiative called Taboom. Taboom will advance the human rights of vulnerable, marginalized, and disenfranchised communities by improving media coverage of the taboo topics affecting their lives and shaping global conflicts.

What We Do

Through strategic partnerships and targeted sub-grants, we aim to work with media monitoring partners in each Sub-Saharan African country to monitor, rate, translate and share local media coverage of SSOGIE-related content with the broader coalition network via a shared platform and centralized database.The coalition will use a rating system to respond rapidly to harfuml coverage, and to monitor country- and region- outlet specific improvements and deteriorations in SSOGIE-related media coverage over the long-term.

Who We Are

Brian Pellot is the Cape Town-based director of global strategy at the secular non-sectarian Religion News Service and Religion News Foundation. He is the author of "Covering Sexual and Gender Minorities & Religion in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Reporting Guide for Journalists" and speaks regularly about freedom of expression, religious freedom, and LGBTQI+ rights at media and human rights conferences around the world. Debra L. Mason, PhD, is a leading scholar and trainer on how religion is portrayed in the media. She brings more than 30 years of professional and scholarly experience to her position as director of the Center on Religion & the Professions, an interdisciplinary center at the world-renowned Missouri School of Journalism. She has also envisioned and managed creation of the largest repository of religion resources for journalists, including ReligionStylebook.com and ReligionLink.com. For nearly 20 years, she served as director of Religion News Association, a professional association of journalists who cover religion in mass media. She is publisher emeritus of Religion News Service (RNS), the world’s only non-sectarian wire service exclusively covering religion. She has played key roles in entrepreneurial efforts to create local, online and sustainable models of professional religion news, resources and training.